Event: Storm at Mercury
Last night, I covered the second game of the Phoenix Mercury season. Phoenix was 0-2, losing their home opener to the Sparks, and a road loss to the Silver Stars. Early on the Mercury really took the lead, going up by 21, but eventually the Storm came back and won 87-83. A link to the gallery is in the full post.
Last weekend I spoke about the key elements to covering an event. This time around, I’ll cover the bases on the technical side of an image.
What makes for a good clean image? What keeps the images looking consistent in their color, white balance, and exposure, not just from one image to another within one event, but from event to event (as an example, compare last weekends gallery to the one for last night’s game).
In this post, I’ll do an overview on things you can do to keep a consistent look and quality to your images.
First things first: Get the proper exposure. Everyone is going to have a different opinion on this. Aperture priority mode, Program mode, Manual mode, everyone has a different way of achieving the same goal. Whatever you do, make sure that your exposure is good. If you consistently have to take images into Photoshop and adjust the exposure, than you should consider looking into different modes and techniques for proper exposure.
White balance is also key. By getting the right white balance, your colors will look more true to life. Cameras have come a long way, but even the best auto white balance can be fooled under tricky lighting situations. Your best bet is to learn how to lock down that white balance. Most cameras offer preset white balances like tungsten (the light bulb), fluorescent (the blinking bar), daylight (sun). Some cameras will also allow for a custom white balance. You can set a custom white balance by shooting a gray card (this is a card that is measured for color accuracy to be neutral). This will measure the hue of the light, and neutralize it.
Most cameras come with color modes. Things like Vivid, Portrait, and Standard, try to punch up different hues in order to produce a great image. I like to avoid these, because in lower light situations, the images tend to have a lot of image noise, and those color modes will accentuate this noise. Rather, I like to shoot in a neutral or no adjustment mode. From there, I have a set recipe that I use in Photoshop to color my images. A lot of people like to experiment with different adjustments, using levels, curves, brightness/contrast, etc, to punch up their colors, but I find those to be too time subjective. By finding the right recipe, I can apply it to any of my images automatically, with an action, and not manually adjusting each image.
All the images I’ve posted from the last galleries for the WNBA games were processed with a simple Photoshop action. I do not manually adjust anything to taste, except for cropping the image. From there, my action automatically uses noise reduction, then applies my color recipe, and then resizes the image. If I didn’t have a consistent exposure, white balance, and color mode in the camera, the process would take each image all over the map as far as their “look”.
Keep your work consistent, and you will see that no matter what your post process is, it will be a lot less time consuming, and the results will look that much better.
Please feel free to comment with your opinions and ideas on how to get a consistent “look”
The link to last nights game can be found here:
Hi PShizzy,
Again, thanks for all your advice. How do you resize and image as an action? What I mean is, when I resize I use Genuine Fractals (OnOne) in my action, but I need to manually set each one. Am I taking the long route in order to achieve resizing?
Susan
Susan,
Can you save a preset resize setting for Genuine Fractals? If not, then it may be problematic. Normally actions can recall settings, even for certain plugins, but that’s not always the case. Check with the Genuine Fractals people to see if they support actions. I’ll look into this as well. If you find out anything, please email me or let me know so I can remember it for future use.
Hi. Do you ever sharpen your images before you publish them on the web. When you resize the images you tend to loos the sharpness, especially when looking at them online in 72dpi.
/Erik, Sweden
Erik,
besides the usual sharpening of the image when first working with the file, I will use “bicubic sharper” when resizing in Photoshop CS3. I believe this has been a feature since CS2. Before that, I would use USM, Unsharp Mask, very slightly to sharpen up an image after resizing it. The level of sharpening you use is highly dependent on your output, and how much you’re resizing.